Wear flame retardant gloves when you read "In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire," because Mike Davis writes commentary that burns into each page.

Provocative is an understatement for Davis's lacerating and incendiary social and political analysis. You're likely to agree with 80% of it and violently disagree with the other 20%. This is a prolific author, a leftist intellectual gadfly (he's a professor of history, by the way), who takes no prisoners in his outraged pursuit of a just world.

The Democratic Leadership Council would likely burn Davis at the stake, if they could get away with it, at one of their lobbbyist fundraisers. Not that Davis is preoccupied by the DLC; his reach is much too far ranging to become obsessed with some pathetic esablishment types who claim to speak for the Democratic Party. No, in his collection of "essays against empire," Davis traverses the world and sets it aflame with righteous indignation.

Some of his writings in "Barbarians" may have been penned awhile back, but they are not outdated. Davis writes in a style that transcends the historial moment. Picking up his book is like an intellectual roller coaster ride that keeps thrilling you with its pugnacious insights.

Mike Davis is one of the few writers whom we've come across who can make a BuzzFlash Editorial appear like cautious rhetoric.

The guy is blistering. We love it.

From the publisher:

Mike Davis attacks the current fashion for empires and white men’s burdens in this blistering collection of radical essays. He skewers such contemporary idols as Mel Gibson and Howard Dean, debates with Tom Frank about “what’s the matter with America,” unlocks some secret doors in the Pentagon and the California prison system, visits Star Wars in the Arctic and vigilantes on the U.S.-Mexico border, predicts ethnic cleansing in New Orleans more than a year before Katrina, commemorates the anarchist avengers of the 1890s, remembers “Private Ivan” who defeated fascism, recalls the “teenybopper riots” on Sunset Strip, and looks at the future of global capitalism from the top of Hubbert’s Peak.